Here I am at the precipice.
Okay… Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but then again that’s how it feels.
Last week I graduated from college with my BA in English: literature and writing. I walked across the stage and shook hands with people whose faces I won’t remember. I moved my tassel and threw my cap and hugged my friends. I took awful photos and showed off my fake diploma and, at the end of the long day that followed, collapsed onto my bed trying to sort in my mind the days events.
It was over – finally over. I spent five years to get my degree. Five years that were certainly far from easy: student loans, financial struggles, multiple jobs, hours of daily commuting, those six months couch surfing at my uncle’s place in Brooklyn - living out of duffle bags as I split my time evenly between winding Long Island suburbs and the commercial, familiar streets of Kensington. Five years of struggling for what I felt I needed to do. All of that time had led up to this – to this moment. This promise of everything I could do handed to me all rolled up and tied with a blue ribbon as the cameras flashed.
… But what was it?
What was I doing?
As I looked up at my off-white ceiling I was hit with the overwhelming realization that I had no plan. No jobs lined up. No idea what I was going to do. These were all things that I, of course, had realized much earlier – before I had stared at the ceiling and before I walked across the stage. And I had, of course, pushed these thoughts away because the stress of thinking critically about my future did not enjoy the company of finals stress or, for that matter, last semester stress in general. But there I was – there was no running from it. I was at the edge staring into the void.
The truth is I know I’m not alone in these thoughts. My friends have expressed the same sense of doom. We laugh about it – joking in tones better fit for Internet humor than conversations of credit scores and debt repayment plans. We sip matcha bowls we paid for with money we know we shouldn’t be squandering. We tell one another we’ll revise our resumes for post-grad internships knowing full and well that we would pass up an unpaid great opportunity for a miserable retail job with a steady paycheck. I find solace in the idea that I am not the only one who is lost and wandering, hoping that one day I can find the balance between wistful dreams of passionate work I’ll create and the realistic notion of desk jobs and patterned life.
People keep asking me, “Marissa, what’s next for you?” I knit my brows together and smile an awkward, toothy grin and tell them that I don’t know – that I’m still working that part out. They look about as concerned as one would imagine. I tell them, apologetically, that I just want to pay back my loans; a half truth I pull out when I feel a wave of shame approaching.
Maybe that’s okay – that I don’t know. Maybe that’s just fine. Because I’m young. Because there is still so much time. Because being a writer isn’t something that happens, it’s something that grows.
So I’ll keep pushing forward – whatever that means and wherever it takes me. The cliché is that life is a journey. Life isn’t easy. Maybe not all clichés are bad. I’m ready to find out.
